Jan Breuer is a troubled man. "No exaggeration, I have been kept awake some nights thinking how this might affect me and my family," he said, referring to the current drama to save the euro being played out on the world stage. "I'm hoping to find some answers here." The unemployed welder tapped on a white-bound hardback called Germany Doesn't Need the Euro, which he had just bought.

In the book the former German central bank board member Thilo Sarrazin argues that Angela Merkel's motivation for trying to save the euro is being driven by Germany's guilt for the Holocaust and the second world war, and that far from risking more on the crisis, as the rest of the world seems to be insisting, the country should ditch the euro altogether.

Breuer has keenly felt the effects of the global economic recession. The 49-year-old from Wismar, on Germany's Baltic coast, lost his job at the city's shipyard in 2011 following a worldwide downturn in the shipping industry, and now gets by on earnings from odd jobs and his dole money.

"It does seem to me bizarre that we as a country are having to put so much into saving a currency and propping up countries where people retire at 55, while we ourselves are suffering – the shipyard workforce here has been cut from 6,000 to around 500 – and those lucky enough to be in work have seen wages frozen and will have to keep working until the age of 67," he said.

As Europe's economic powerhouse, Germany is the only country in the eurozone capable of bailing out insolvent countries such as Greece, Ireland and Portugal and coming up with the financial backing to support Spain's collapsing banks. But however much Germans think it is in their interests to save the euro and to keep paying the soaring price tag to do so, Merkel insisted last week that its powers were ultimately restricted. "Germany's strength is not infinite, its powers are not unlimited," she said, which is why she is so insistent on wanting the fiscal pact (more budgetary discipline) to be a condition of Germany's acceptance of a permanent bailout scheme.

Sarrazin's book, like his 2010 bestseller Germany is Digging Its Own Grave – which argued the country was awash with illiterate, overbreeding, semi-criminal Muslims and sold more than 1.3 million copies – has been lapped up across Germany, with passages of it regularly regurgitated in beer gardens and cafes across the land. It has helped give voice to the growing number of so-called Wutburger or enraged citizens, such as Breuer, who feel that enough is enough, that Germany's resources are limited.

"It is our bestselling non-fiction book by far right now," said Volker Stein, manager of the Weiland bookshop in Wismar where Breuer had just bought his copy and where it is being displayed prominently in the window before an upcoming reading event with Sarrazin that sold out weeks ago. "It's not selling as well as his previous book but only, I think, because people are fed up to the back teeth with the euro crisis, and it's also quite a tough read," Stein added.

But Sarrazin has certainly touched a nerve with his argument that Germany's willingness to bail out Greece, and its preparedness to step in to "help other countries ad infinitum", is proof of its "susceptibility to blackmail", suggesting that Germany is turning into "a hostage of all those in the eurozone who may in the future, for whatever reason, need help".

Unsurprisingly his book has been praised by the far-right NPD party, who welcomed the ex-banker's criticism of Germany's "psychopathological guilt complex that makes it fulfil almost every wish of self-interested foreign countries even 67 years after the end of the war".

Sarrazin has also tapped into popular sentiment in Germany about Europe's southern rim, arguing that the Mediterranean people's very attitude to life – depicted in every publication, from the lowbrow Bild to the more august Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, as backward, lazy and corrupt – is threatening the future stability of the world.

"The foggier a country is, and the colder and wetter its winters, the more likely it is that it believes in financial and political forethought," he writes.

Sarrazin also believes that Germany – as a country with an export-based economy that last year generated €2.5 trillion or a good quarter of what the rest of the eurozone combined produced – does not and never did need the euro.

Despite dismissals by prominent political figures such as the former Social Democrat finance minister Peer Steinbrück, who called Sarrazin's book "banal economic analysis", and calculations that giving up the euro would cost Germany a crippling €1.5tn, his assessment would appear to be in line with public opinion; a recent survey revealed that 55% of Germans wished they had kept hold of the Deutschmark and 53% saw the common currency as a personal disadvantage to themselves.

According to another study, despite a healthy German economy every second German believes they will be personally affected by the euro crisis, and, as a direct result of it, only 13% think their children will have a better standard of living than they now enjoy.

Germany is feeling battered, bullied and misunderstood.

They are also not as thick-skinned as they might sometimes seem, acutely aware through their own media of the negative way in which they are being viewed by many Greeks. As well as Merkel having been depicted as a reincarnation of Adolf Hitler, according to the Greek magazine Epikaira every third person in Greece now associates Germany with words like Hitler, Nazis and Third Reich, "while just a few years ago it would have been 'industriousness', or 'German cars'," the magazine suggested.

While it would be far-fetched to suggest that the public's frustration had seeped into mainstream political thinking, there is a growing number of pressure groups who are joining forces under the anti-euro banner, who broadly speaking want to do away with bailouts – for which Germany has so far put up €300bn – and are calling for crisis states to leave the eurozone.

"We are the political arm of commonsense Germans," said Hubert Aiwanger, the head of Freie Wähler, or Free Voters, a Bavaria-based anti-euro group working towards securing a presence in the Bundestag at next autumn's general election.

While this extra-parliamentary opposition is politically insignificant now, analysts have said it could be the "spark that lights the haystack" if the crisis spreads.

Dubbed the group's "spiritual father", Hans-Werner Sinn, one of the country's most respected economists, has argued that despite the pressure Merkel is facing it would be self-defeating of her to show more largesse. "Only a politics of restrictive rescue, that limits the amount of bailout money, will give the indebted states inducement to make cuts where they are needed and to improve their competitiveness through price and wage decreases." Any other course of action, he argues, "will prolong the crisis".

A woman who asked to be called Helene Schmidt, and refused to give her real name, agreed. "You would not give your child its pocket money and then tell it to tidy its bedroom," she said. The retired shipyard administrator was sitting on Wismar's market square poring over the tabloid Bild's coverage of the G20 summit in Mexico, with the headline: "The whole world revolves around Merkel."

"I do feel sorry for Greece, I really do," she said, "when I see people can't get their medicines and have to go to soup kitchens, but the idea that Germany should be lectured to on economics by the Americans, after the mess they have got us into, or by Cameron, who traditionally hasn't wanted to have anything to do with Europe anyway", is absurd. "The bottom line is that Germany is the growth locomotive of Europe. Ruin that by burdening us with more bailouts, and you destroy any chance of Europe getting back on its feet."

Like many economists and politicians she cites pressures at home – the number of kindergarten closures, the increasing number of long-term unemployed and the shrinking pensions – as reasons why Germany cannot continue to bail out Europe indefinitely.

Uwe Jean Heuser, economic commentator of Die Zeit, said: "If Germany is held liable for the risks of an undisciplined Europe then it will soon lose the trust of those lending the money, and then who in euroland would pay?" Arguing that Germany was doomed if it did not hold out on its insistence that countries reform their economies as a condition for being bailed out, he compared the current tensions between Washington/London and Germany, over everything from eurobonds to bank union to debt-pooling, with the James Dean film Rebel Without a Cause – when two cars speed towards an abyss and whoever jumps out first has lost.

"Germany is being pressurised to jump out of the car to save the world," he wrote. "The question is, who will give in first?"